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http://www.gutenberg.m. . .etc.
by Michael S. Hart 02 Mar '11

02 Mar '11

One of our readers asked me to pass on to you his compliments on how well our site works on his mobile devices!!! Thanks!!!!!!!

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

tuesday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi refactored code should run faster. (or not.) -bowerbird

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Re: extra gruel
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

hey marcello, make sure jimmy gets some extra gruel tonight too. -bowerbird

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Re: Background Colour for Reading
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

geez. i point out one classic "jim" post, only to find he just posted another one! and this one is even shorter! so let's quote it in full, ok? jim said: > It's amazing how intensely personal > each person's preference for a reader device is, > what display technology, what choice of fonts, > serif vs. sans, text color, background color, > big or small and light, etc. > > And it is amazing how with a little thought > on the authorship side how we can already today > make books using one source format that come > pretty close to meeting customer expectations > re all these choices! that's it. the full post. and what's "amazing" about that post is that jim contradicts his first paragraph with his second... take _that_, internal consistency. off with your head! because the _truth_ of the matter is that "we" do not come anywhere even _remotely_ close to the goal of "meeting customers expectations"... not remotely... and that's _precisely_ because people have a _ton_ of preferences, about which they're intensely passionate. which, by the way, anyone who was _paying_attention_ already knew, about people and reading preferences... but lots of people in the e-book world have _never_ paid any attention to user-preferences, so they have no clue they aren't "meeting customer expectations". furthermore, they fail to realize that the file-formats they've built give very short shrift to user-preference. (and often to the e-book _creators_ as well, ironically.) and even when the file-formats might allow expression of user-preference, the viewer-apps often constrict it... for instance, did you see recently how _emotional_ and _strong_ the preference for curly-versus-straight quotes expressed itself? jana said that curly quotes are "correct", so she didn't care if i even offered the option of straight! on the other hand, two other people said "straight, please", and gave some utterly compelling reasons for that choice. but do any .mobi or .epub viewer-programs let their user _specify_ whether they get straight quotes or curly quotes? not that i have seen. you take whatever the builder put in. double-dash vs. typographic em-dash? no choice at all. you get what the creator of the e-book decided you'd get. indented-pargraphs versus block-style? no choice at all. sometimes not even for the darn creator of the e-book! you get whatever the viewer-app decides you're gonna get. justification? sometimes nobody gets any choice at all. sometimes the creator gets a choice, but not the reader. and sometimes (yay!) the reader gets a choice. (not often.) there are many preference variables that are just like these; opinions run strong, as does user desire to configure 'em. we're not even _close_ to "meeting customer expectations". and if you ever talked to any customers, you would know it. -bowerbird

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rendering engines
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

here's a screenshot showing the first page of jim's catalog as displayed in "kindle for mac" versus that page on an ipad, two devices which obviously use different rendering engines: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/rendering-engines.jpg i can't tell which one is live and which one is memorex. can you? > but i do know > that i love you > and i know that > if you love me too > what a wonderful world > this would be... -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Mar '11

01 Mar '11

michael said: > Simple answer Mr. Bowerbird those _are_ the best kind. :+) > I didn't HAVE a Kindle until just recently, > any only got it registered a week ago. . . > as I said when asking about passwords. . . . ok, well, like i said, i'm glad you are awake now. was that a coma you were in, or just a deep sleep? because, just to update you with what has been happening out here in the real world of e-books, kindle has had apps for all the major platforms for some time now, so you don't need an actual _kindle_machine_ itself to get kindle experience. many of the users buying kindle books these days -- or downloading them from the various sites -- do _not_ own a kindle machine. amazon would sell a whole lot fewer k-books if it could only sell them to people who owned a hardware kindle, for sure... heck, even people who _do_ own a hardware kindle report that they use other machines to read k-books. the average usage is that 3 devices are typically used, presumably the phone (when the person didn't bring their kindle along) and their home computer as well. (although an ipad is another possibility, and tablets will increasingly become an extremely popular tool.) that's why the huge number of iphones/ipods/ipads in comparison to kindles is no threat to mr. bezos, because he can still sell books to those customers... indeed, this is why amazon built its "sync" function, which puts your e-book on any number of devices, which "saves your place" in the book automatically and opens up to that spot when you switch devices. your annotations are also saved in the amazon cloud, so you have access to them regardless of device used. if you don't _know_ all of this -- heck, if you are not _deeply_and_intimately_experienced_ with its import, you are _seriously_ lagging in your e-book knowledge. even (especially!) if you're the man who invented them. and -- just to fill you in on another curious matter -- amazon has proven that a vendor does not need to buckle under to the pressure for a "standard format" _if_ that vendor is willing to support its own format across the wide variety of various machinery out there. indeed, more k-books are now sold than .epub books precisely because people know the kindle-books _will_ work uniformly across the different hardware stages, whereas .epub display is maddeningly _inconsistent_... _that_ is why p.g. is getting all the .mobi downloads... it was supposed to be the main benefit of "a standard" that .epub books would work across different platforms, but amazon has stolen that thunder. and -- with the addition of all of its sync functionality -- it has even gone on to offer benefits that .epub will never match, given all of those disparate voices in its parent, i.d.p.f. and you could (and should) have learned all this, michael, without ever having laid your hands on a hardware kindle. but why bemoan the past? i'm glad you're finally awake. *** michael said: > Am I still to expect your old iPhone? you bet. as soon as i get my photos and songs and apps offloaded to all these new toys, i'll send you the old one. (but, as i told you, the screen has a strange blemish on it; i have been thinking that apple might be curious about it, and even trade me a refurb so they can send it to their lab, and if they do trade, i'll happily send you the refurb, friend.) > Then perhaps I can learn more about that. . . . that would be a good thing too... :+) > *** > > michael said; > > I'd like to hear more about Stanza! > > yet another history lesson for the recently reawakened! > > this one is quite short... stanza was a new company which > was on its way to greatness, so to avoid competing against > the upstart, amazon bought it and more-or-less shelved it. > the end. > > i made the first post on the stanza forum, in june of 2008: > > http://www.lexcycle.com/forums/stanza/welcome > > six months later, i first noticed some emerging problems: > > http://www.lexcycle.com/node/591 > > and by six months after that, they had sold out to amazon: > > http://www.lexcycle.com/node/1356 > > last i checked, stanza still didn't work on my laptop mac. > and its converter routines -- which were a big reason why > it was hyped in its early days -- were smoke-and-mirrors > that didn't work well (or sometimes, at all) if you checked. > > stanza has fans, because it works well on some machines, > and it has always had an ambitious outlook (meaning that > it gives users control over a large number of preferences), > so if it works _for_you_, be happy. it doesn't work for me. > i need a viewer-app that works _across_ all of my machines. > > i still pull out stanza on occasion, whenever i get frustrated > by the dreadful quality of the other viewer-apps out there, > because stanza at least _hints_ at the greatness that could be. > it's just too bad that stanza never actually _attains_ greatness. > so it, too, ends up being unsatisfying, at times even more so. > > again, though, if it works for you, be happy! :+) > > *** > > but michael, don't feel bad about your coma... > > because hey, at least now you _are_ awake again! > > many of the other people on this list are demonstrating > that they haven't learned _one_thing_ in the last 5 years, > as they were in a coma in the hospital bed next to yours. > > they're still having the exact same kind of unproductive > exchange which characterized this place back in 2005... > > indeed, i am vaguely suspicious that some of them are > re-submitting posts they sent in february of _that_ year, > as some kind of silly trick to see if anybody will notice... > > -bowerbird >

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

michael, i can't believe you are using _marcello_ to "correct" something that i said. i am amused. :+) all of the platforms can be used to read k-books. the book has the same words, in the same order. none of them show a book that is "simulated". (or should i say that _all_ of 'em do? i dunno. these philosophical questions are too _hard_!) -bowerbird

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A Little About Amazon and eBooks
by Michael S. Hart 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

Something I wrote BEFORE BB's latest. . . . Not to mention 8 million Kindles, half as many as iPads. . . . Oops!!! Was I not supposted to reveal that. . . . Letes not forget, I don't support any particular products, at least in this moment in this context. /// A Little About Amazon and eBooks Amazon recently sold three times as many eBooks as hardbacks, and, for the first time, more eBooks than paperbacks. Amazon, long master of keeping the numbers out of focus, tells us their sales of eBooks, which has been greater than hardbacks for some time... is now also larger than their sales of paperbacks. In yet more of this fuzziness, Amazon says this does not include free eBooks, such as those from Project Gutenberg, nor will they say how many of those go out. However, with 115 eBooks going out to every 100 paperbacks, that is big news, and you can actually add these figures together, as follows: 300+ eBooks for every 100 hardbacks 115+ eBooks for every 100 paperbacks. However, they tell us that the total of hardbacks and paperbacks is now still enough to outnumber eBook sales. Now all we need to know is their proportion of hardbacks to paperbacks. By the way, they only announced more eBooks than hardbacks in mid 2010, and now more eBooks than paperbacks in 2011, which means it won't be an awful long time, perhaps only months, before it's the totals. . . . We should also consider that these figures are not parallel in that the figures include paper books that don't have any eBook version, and as I mentioned above, they refuse to count free eBooks. So far the average Amazon eBook is still selling for over $10 even if a press release touted that over 2/3 million eBooks were Amazon available for $9.99 or less, but the best seller list is more like $15. . . . Amazon is still struggling increase its eBook catalog to one million. We are expecting FIVE million FREE eBooks at The World eBook Fair, from July 4 through August 4 at: http://www.worldebookfair.org

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

michael said: > So, you equate not having the money > to buy one as being not awake. always misinterpreting things as insults, aren't you? so no, michael, that's not what i am "equating" at all. i don't have the money to buy a hardware kindle either. (i spend my meager cash on _generalized_ machines.) but -- like poor people everywhere -- what i _do_ have is the ingenuity to know how to get stuff when it's free, and the perseverance and street-smarts and tenacity to know _how_and_where_ you can get that free stuff... so yes, i've known all along that the kindle apps are free, and i've been evaluating them all along. that's what i do. because i am intensely interested in electronic-books... > You probably also equate ignorance with stupdity. . . . i'm not sure what that means. but i can separate "ignorance" from "stupidity"... easily... so no, you're not "stupid" for not knowing that you could have been evaluating the kindle experience all this time, even without money. you're _ignorant_ for not knowing it. and you'll probably take _that_ as an insult too. > Somehow I never beleived in simulators being real. > Any evidence people are downloading with those? more ignorance. and it's _willfill_ ignorance, to boot! they aren't "simulators". they are viewer-programs which empower kindle customers to read books on a wide array of platforms out there, including i.o.s., android, blackberry, and of course the full gamut of desktop/laptop computers. and yes, people are downloading them, and using them... (and i feel like the _master_ of understatement saying that. in case you haven't heard, amazon is selling e-books like... well... like hotcakes, if you must know, and it is _precisely_ because users can read k-books on all kinds of hardware.) and i am totally bowled over by the fact that _michael_hart_ doesn't know all of this! you should check in with your baby every now and then; she's in college now; did you know that? and everyone wants to date her! remember when she was young, and ugly, and everyone said she was destined to fail? you missed a lot in your coma, old man. > Just how SURE are you? now you're edging from ignorance into stupidity. careful. > Ah. . .back to the money syndrome. . . . you have a computer, right? and a phone, right? and before long, you might get a hand-me-down ipad. you don't need that much money to be connected today. *** one more thing, while i'm here... when i said that amazon bought lexcycle (the company who made stanza) and "more-or-less shelved it", i didn't mean to imply that they had done something unethical... that kind of behavior is very common in the tech world. if lexcycle had made good on their initially-stated goals -- which was to provide a seamless arena for e-books across both _file-formats_ and _hardware-platforms_ -- they would have blown up amazon's proprietary plans... so amazon bought them. you can't allow a random company to ruin your company. but another company could have then started itself up and made an initial announcement to do the very same thing -- i.e., build a cross-platform, cross-format e-book arena. with a good first stab at that goal, they too might've been considered as an acquisition. that's called "build-to-flip". i was kinda amazed that nobody actually _did_ that tactic. (if i had any itch to get-rich-quick, i certainly would have. hey, i even considered doing it as a joke on the universe.) and even if amazon didn't buy you, the rest of the world would have made sure that you were making some profit. (that's why lexcycle flipped; they wanted to make money.) amazon bought stanza as an "insurance policy" against the chance that .epub would get a bunch of momentum. if so, amazon then had lexcycle's .epub expertise in-house. that the purchase also _destroyed_ the .epub momentum which lexcycle had generated by attaining that expertise was just a nice "side-effect" which accompanied the deal. that was so ironic, because the momentum stanza created made the move to .epub irreversible, which has mired the non-amazon ebook-world in .epub quicksand ever since. so this was indeed a brilliant master-stroke by amazon... but i.d.p.f. _created_ this mess when it failed to produce any open-source "reference implementations" for .epub, so that _any_ company could've been a threat to amazon and its reliance on its proprietary format to get lock-in... but the i.d.p.f. chose that particular course of inaction -- i.e., the failure to code reference implementations -- because they were trying to sideline e-books _in_toto_. but amazon one-upped them, with an idea which would no longer be denied at this particular place and time... and of course, even since then, the corporate publishers have continued to keep shooting themselves in the foot. their move to the agency model has _sealed_the_deal_ for amazon's proprietary format, since stores that offer .epub can no longer use pricing as a weapon to undercut amazon. it would've been difficult before, since amazon is the best company at undercutting, but now it's simply _impossible._ so now, consumers are stuck with the same price everywhere, and file-format is one of the few "deciding factors" that's left. and most of those consumers are deciding on kindle-format, since that's the format that actually does work cross-platform, while .epub just makes that (empty) promise but fails to fill it. so i hope all you .epub supporters are happy. you got the "open format" you wished for. watch out what you wish for. -bowerbird

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Re: time after time
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Feb '11

28 Feb '11

monday's version is up: > http://76.74.254.239/~bowerbird/a.fcgi .pdf simple-book output stabilized and finalized. .pdf right-sized for optimum display on the ipad. jana's scroll-to-the-search-term request installed. cowbell included. *** let me know when you guys decide what a paragraph is. sounds utterly fascinating.. -bowerbird

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